I was just looking at some old 1980s screenshots and wondering “why don’t you ever see syntax highlighting in inverse video”? And then I randomly stumbled upon this deep dive into syntax highlighting from Nikita Prokopov.

I don’t know if I disagree with everything here, but there’s a lot of great stuff in there, and a lot of food for thought.

Highlighting everything is like assigning “top priority” to every task in Linear. It only works if most of the tasks have lesser priorities.

I thought the mention that comments should be visually promoted, not demoted, was particularly insightful.

Also, the idea that light themes are not popular because the colors are duller… this is very interesting. It could be so interesting to try a light theme with very prominent chiefly at the periphery of Display P3.

I have never been very invested in syntax highlighting because I find the UI to change it in text editors is usually pretty harrowing, but now I’m interested.